Re: [patch 2/2] sched: dynticks idle load balancing - v2

[Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 02:33:00PM -0800, Suresh B wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 04:26:54AM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > This is really ugly, sorry :(
> 
> hm. myself and others too thought it was a simple and nice idea.

The idea is not bad. I won't guarantee mine will be as good or better,
but I think it is sensible to try implementing the simplest approach
first, so we can get a baseline to justify more complexity against...

Your code just needs work, but if it really produces good results then
it should be able to be made into a mergeable patch.

> > My suggestion for handling this was to increase the maximum balance
> > interval for an idle CPU, and just implement a global shutdown when
> > the entire system goes idle.
> > 
> > The former should take care of the power savings issues for bare metal
> > hardware, and the latter should solve performance problems for many idle
> > SMP guests. It should take very little code to implement.
> 
> coming to max balance interval will be challenging. It needs to save
> power and at the same time respond to load changes fast enough.

Yep.

> > If that approach doesn't cut it, then at least we can have some numbers
> > to see how much better yours is so we can justify including it.
> > 
> > If you are against my approach, then I can have a try at coding it up
> > if you like?
> 
> Sure. If you can provide a patch, I will be glad to provide power and
> performance comparision numbers with both the approaches.

OK that would be good. I'll see if I can code something up by next week.

Thanks,
Nick